Roy Tang

It’s the last weekend of March. It feels like the month went by quickly.

The world:

• Local covid response: The government introduced the concept of an “NCR Plus” bubble last Monday, restricting travel in and out of the NCR and adjacent provinces, in response to the rising cases. Still, the daily counts kept rising, hitting record highs of almost 10k cases daily. Even before the dust has settled on the bubble response, they decided to announce last night a reversion to the stricter ECQ. Shades of last year, during the run up to the first lockdown announcement: rumors circulated via chat groups about the impending lockdown before the government finally made their announcement. As can be expected, memes quickly circulated about how we came back to ECQ more than a year after the first lockdown. The lockdown is imposed only for one week, during the Holy Week period, presumably to take advantage of the two holidays in the week to minimize economic impact. The fact that they imposed two different levels of responses one after another reeks of poor planning and analysis, as if they were just making all this up as they go along, which might not be far from the truth. What happens if the case counts continue to rise until next Sunday?
• In a bit of economically-devastating-yet-unintentionally-hilarious world news: a very large container ship, the MV EVER GIVEN, ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking passage, and has been stuck there since Tuesday-ish, clogging up global shipping trade through the canal. Apparently losses are at the order of $400M per hour or something? IDK, I’m not an economist. All I’m sure of is the internet almost immediately produced a bunch of memes, and even horny fanfic.

Links of interest:

• Read this interesting post about blogging and the blogosphere.
• Something that interested me mostly for trivia purposes: 30 covers that are better than the originals
• Douglas Adams’ note to self reveals author found writing torture
• Paul Graham reminds us to write simply.

My stuff:

• Sketching, sketching.
• Watching:
  • Continuing my run on the Bond movies with You Only Live Twice (1967). Secret volcano lair!
  • I also managed to convince myself to sit down and watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League. I couldn’t manage to sit down for four hours straight, so it was two sittings over two days.
  • Second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier last Friday. Still a bit meh, mostly because there hasn’t been anything I haven’t expected yet. But that’s bound to change as I think all the content from the trailers have been shown by now. Some good acting by Sebastian Sean though.
  • Finished watching Star Trek The Animated Series, Star Trek TV series completion!
  • First 3 episodes Invincible have dropped on Prime Video. Most of the first episode is good, clean superhero fun, but by the end of the episode you are dissuaded of that notion. Pretty good pacing, seems mostly accurate to the source material, looking forward to the rest of it.
  • Also been rewatching The Office as my background watching, mostly because I listened to a podcast of Office trivia.
• Gaming:
  • Second Fire Emblem Three Houses run: Still ongoing, somehow. It feels like I’m doing these in real time, only advancing one week of the game per week of real life. At that rate, I should be done in like six months lol.
  • After five years of playing Street Fighter V, I managed to dig myself out of the pits of the bronze ranks and hit silver! Surprisingly, on the next two days after this, I had trouble finding ranked matches again. I took that as a sign to take a break before attempting to climb up to gold.
  • Final Civ6 NFP drop came out as expected. Not super hyped, but I have started a Portugal game already, they seem really strong especially on island maps.
  • Strixhaven official previews kicked off, and I’m really hyped for the set, mostly because I really like the Mystical Archive cards. Collecting all of them on Arena is gonna be a challenge though.
  • Supposedly Magic Arena is now available “everywhere” on mobile, but not in Southeast Asia though.
• Books: I mentioned last week that I started reading the Discworld book “Guards! Guards!”, but for some reason everything seemed so familiar, and soon I realized it was because I had already read it back in 2016. Doh! I was enjoying it anyway, so I finished the re-read and will probably publish a review, since I didn’t have one in 2016. But I’ll finish the next City Watch book first: Men at Arms.
• AboutQuiz this week a bit better than last week, but I still miss the other trivia groups.
• I hit the 800-day streak on Duolingo!

This coming week:

• New FatWS episode, etc etc. I presume new Invincible episode as well.
• Maybe the world will miraculously be better next week? IDK, one can always hope right?
• It’s Holy Week! Normally a big deal for the RC faithful in this country, but this time everyone has to stay at home for the second year in a row.
• ECQ! Well, that doesn’t affect me much, though there are now some errands that we have to push back.